Modern operating rooms for performing surgery have seen several advancements over the past two decades. In the late 20th century, state-of-the-art operating rooms included several electronic surgical instruments (i.e. electrosurgical units, insufflators, endoscopes, etc.). These instruments were separately operated by the surgeon and members of the surgical team. The industry improved upon this type of operating room by integrating the various instruments into a unified system. With this configuration, the surgeon and/or members of the team use a central controller (or surgical control unit) to control all of the instruments through a single interface (often a graphical-user interface). Generally speaking, these central control units were built using modified personal computers and the operating rooms using them are commonly referred to as “digital operating rooms”.
The establishment of the digital operating room paved the way for the voice controlled operating room. With this system, a member of the surgical team (usually the surgeon) wears a headset with a microphone. The surgeon issues spoken commands into the headset, these commands are sent to the central controller that controls the various instruments to perform desired tasks or make on-the-fly adjustments to operating parameters. The central controller operates software including a speech-to-text converter (i.e. speech recognition software) to interpret and execute the voice commands. Since computers often have difficulty understanding spoken language, typical systems include audible confirmation feedback to the surgical team, notifying them that a command has been understood and executed by the controller. Since sterility is critically important in all surgical procedures, this touch-free control system represented a significant advancement.
The voice-controlled digital operating room was further improved by the introduction of the wireless voice-control headset. This gave the surgeon greater mobility and eliminated the microphone cable as a possible source of contamination or nuisance for the surgeon. Voice controlled digital operating rooms with wireless headsets represent the modern state-of-the-art in the field. Although this type of system has worked well for the convenience and efficacy of the surgical team and the maintenance of sterility, it has a few drawbacks.
By using ambient microphones, the wireless headset is eliminated as a potential source of contamination. However, the use of ambient microphones introduces new problems. Ambient microphone voice control systems use similar speech recognition software as headset voice control systems. It would be further advantageous for a voice controlled medical system to be able to receive simultaneous commands from multiple users, because multiple members of a medical team could efficiently take multiple actions simultaneously during an operation. For example, it would be advantageous for a nurse or surgeon's assistant to be able to control peripheral device functions while a surgeon simultaneously conducts an operation using only devices centrally important to the task at hand. This would reduce the workload of the surgeon and would allow the surgeon to dedicate all efforts to critically important tasks. As a result, total operation time and the frequency of surgical errors could be reduced.
However, state-of-the-art voice control systems are not capable of receiving and executing simultaneous commands from multiple users. Typically, only a single wireless headset is paired to each system and the wireless headsets do not pick up significant audio from distant sources. Thus, wireless headset systems can only receive commands from one user at a time. Ambient microphone systems can receive commands from multiple users in an environment. However, they usually exhibit poorer signal quality and voice recognition and cannot distinguish between multiple sources of commands. As a result, they are usually programmed to reject multiple simultaneous commands as a safety feature. If the system fails to reject commands from multiple users, it puts the patient at risk of suffering injury due the medical system taking undesired actions.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,752,050 to Hameed et al. describes a system capable of executing commands from multiple users. However, this system uses a simple switching mechanism to alternate between the audio channels of the two users. Although this system can preferentially execute commands from one of the users (i.e. by locking out the other channel when simultaneous commands are received), it cannot intelligently parse and execute simultaneous commands. Therefore, true simultaneous multi-user instrument control is not achieved.
There remains a need in the art for a voice controlled surgical system that can safely execute simultaneous commands from multiple users.